Sun Delivers OpenSolaris, and Amazon Has the Hookup

by Sam Dean - May. 05, 2008Comments (1)

As Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference kicks off this week, along with its CommunityOne open source conference, Sun and the OpenSolaris community have jointly announced the availability of the OpenSolaris operating system. It's a fully open source open, community-driven operating system, based on Sun's Solaris kernel. You can download it free now. There is more news out of Sun today, too, including a hookup between Amazon and the OpenSolaris community. Is this latest push in Sun's extensive commitment to open source going to help it compete with Linux rivals?

Previously available in a developer-only pre-release version, the OpenSolaris OS is the first to feature Sun's ZFS as its file system, and is a fully supported OS. ZFS has instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities, designed to let users test ideas. Solaris Containers also allow developers to build virtualization-aware applications, allowing virtualization applications to run on more than 1,000 systems, ranging from single CPU systems, to multi-CPU and multi-core systems. Virtualization, and particularly its impact on cost and efficiency in data centers, remains a big focus for Sun.

Sun's new open source OS features contributions from many prominent open source communities, including GNOME and Mozilla (the OS has the GNOME Desktop look and feel). A feature called Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) lets application developers optimize programs by providing extensive observability of how production systems are behaving, and how underlying software stacks can be optimized for new apps.

In related news, Amazon and the OpenSolaris community have announced the availability of the OpenSolaris OS on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The collaboration between Amazon and OpenSolaris will give customers access to Sun's open source software, MySQL premium technical support, and more.

Amazon is aiming at developers, enterprises, startups and students who want to develop cloud-based applications quickly, deploy them on an infrastructure that can scale up, and add capacity as needed. GigaOm has more on Amazon's relationship with OpenSolaris and input from Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

The big question about OpenSolaris, of course, is how it will compete with Linux distributions. OpenSolaris concentrates on packaging capabilities designed to make it competitive with Linux platforms. Packaging capabilities that parallel those on Linux platforms are included, following work on a project dubbed Project Indiana. Now called the OpenSolaris Image Packaging System, those installing OpenSolaris and integrating it with third-party applications can work with a Live CD install image to try out the OS before fully installing it.

Another area where OpenSolaris must work to compete with Linux rivals is support. OpenSolaris is a fully supported operating system, although prices won't be available until May 13th. If Sun can offer low support pricing, especially for sites such as data centers with many systems running the new operating system, it may have a chance to make some inroads against Linux rivals.

PC World also offers up some interesting analysis of how OpenSolaris can become a focus for cloud computing developers, and how features in the operating system such as DTrace could allow developers to deploy web-scale applications faster than they can on Linux platforms.

Those are the three areas where I see possible opportunities for Sun here: rapid deployment for web-scale applications, low-priced support, and extensive bug-checking and reliability assurances. In particular, given what the Red Hats of the world charge for support, it may make sense for Sun to offer extremely low-priced support to start out. We'll see if Sun delivers on that on May 13th.

Do you think Sun's new OS will have a chance against Linux rivals?


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Jesse Babson uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



1 Comments
 

Yes.

Opensolaris brings another kind of stability to the user. With Opensolaris You can do more long term planning, not worrying to much of sudden changes in the linux kernel.

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